A group of attorneys close to President Trump is lobbying the White House to declare a national emergency that would hand the executive branch sweeping authority over the conduct of midterm elections. The effort centers on a 17-page draft executive order that would mandate voter ID nationwide, ban mail-in voting, and require all ballots tofeb be counted by hand.
The draft order pins its legal justification on alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 presidential election, claiming the threats "have not been mitigated but instead have intensified." It frames the situation as "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."
The push comes as the SAVE Act, Trump's preferred legislative vehicle for election reform, has stalled in the Senate despite clearing the House on a mostly party-line vote of 218-213 earlier this month.
Peter Ticktin, an attorney who has known Trump since their days at New York Military Academy and has represented him in court, is among the lawyers driving the emergency declaration strategy. Ticktin told The Washington Post that he understands Congress anad the states traditionally hold legal authority over elections, but argued the circumstances demand executive action:
But here we have a situation where the President is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the President has to be able to deal with it.
Ticktin acknowledged he has had "certain coordination" with the White House on the plan. He contends that mail-in ballots and voting machines have served as conduits for foreign meddling.
According to the Daily Mail, Ticktin also represents Tina Peters, who was sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in a 2021 security breach in the elections office she was supposed to oversee. That connection will not help the credibility of the push in the eyes of critics, though it does not change the underlying policy questions about election security.
ABC News reported that Trump has reviewed the document himself. On February 13, the President wrote on Truth Social that he would be "presenting an executive order "shortly."
The emergency declaration gambit exists because the legislative path has hit a wall. Trump hammered home the importance of the SAVE Act during his record-long State of the Union address on Tuesday, framing it in characteristically direct terms:
Congress should unite and enact this common-sense, country-saving legislation right now and it should be before anything else happens.
He went further, accusing Democrats of relying on fraud as a political strategy:
They want to cheat. They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat and we're going to stop it.
The White House, through spokesman Abigail Jackson, affirmed the President's commitment to the legislative approach, saying Trump "has urged Congress to pass the SAVE Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting."
But the Senate math is unforgiving. It takes 60 votes to end debate, and Republicans hold a 53-47 majority. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, speaking on Wednesday after Trump's speech, conceded that Republicans "aren't unified on an approach" and that "we aren't there yet."
The fractures are specific. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina captured the tension cleanly: "I agree with the SAVE Act. But I'm not going to nuke the filibuster." Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has said she opposes the SAVE Act outright. Former GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has opposed similar legislation in the past.
Some in the conference have floated a "talking filibuster" approach to get around Democratic opposition, but as of yesterday, the bill appeared to have stalled entirely.
Trump is not treating the SAVE Act as one item among many. He is treating it as the precondition for everything else. Speaker Mike Johnson framed the political calculus in existential terms, warning that a Democrat majority in either chamber "would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect." Trump allies have stressed the importance of holding the House through 2027.
The President has made clear he will assign blame if Republicans lose their congressional majorities in November, pointing the finger at Democrats and potentially at Thune himself. That is not an idle threat. It is a roadmap for the political consequences of inaction.
Trump has long railed against what he calls "rigged elections" and has pushed for the SAVE Act as a means to "stop illegal aliens and others, who are unpermitted persons, from voting in our sacred American elections." He has called the evidence of cheating "overwhelming" and insisted "the cheating is rampant."
Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who serves as ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, dismissed the emergency push entirely:
Let's be clear: there's no national emergency. This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters.
This is the reflexive Democratic position on virtually every election-integrity measure proposed over the last five years. Voter ID, which is standard practice in nearly every functioning democracy on earth, is treated as an attack on democracy itself. Banning ballot harvesting, a practice that invites precisely the kind of chain-of-custody problems that erode public trust, is characterized as suppression. The pattern is consistent: any measure that makes it harder to cheat is framed as making it harder to vote.
Warner's framing also reveals a deeper contradiction. Democrats spent years insisting that foreign interference in elections was the gravest threat to American democracy. They built an entire investigative apparatus around the premise after 2016. Now, when the executive branch proposes using emergency powers to address alleged foreign interference, they call it a "plot." The concern about foreign meddling, it turns out, was always selective.
The national emergency route raises legitimate constitutional questions about the scope of executive authority over elections. Those questions deserve serious debate. But they should not obscure the underlying reality that prompted this entire conversation: millions of Americans do not trust the system. They watched the 2020 election and its aftermath. They watched the resistance to audits, the hostility toward transparency, the reflexive dismissal of every concern as "misinformation."
Voter ID is not radical. Paper ballots are not radical. Counting votes by hand is how most of the world does it. If these measures threaten your electoral strategy, that tells the country everything it needs to know about your electoral strategy.
The SAVE Act is stalled. The emergency order is circulating. The midterms are approaching. Something will move because the President has made clear that nothing is an acceptable answer.
